Qi Spot

Not so much real “news” but personal news.  I’ll be flying over to Beijing tomorrow for a one month preceptorship.  Well I won’t literally be flying… I’ll be riding a plane which will do the flying… ha.

Anyway as I was walking back to my Shenzhen hotel room with my walmart-purchased dinner, I glanced at the name of a hospital.  I had wanted to take a picture but the sun was setting and the lighting was sucky.  Anyway the name was 2nd Hospital of Shenzhen, Center for Integration of Chinese and Western Medicine.

Buzzword: Integration.  Possible?  Heck, it works for a lot of cancer patients in China…. then again not all.

A buzz topic now is the translation of the government label “No Approved Therapeutic Claims” into Filipino.  The term “No Approved Therapeutic Claims” was used for “food supplements” – a blanket term for non-big pharma produced products, usually “natural” or “herbal” medicine.

“No Approved Therapeutic Claims” thus means – “the claims of these products are not validated by the BFAD/FDA (Bureau of Food and Drugs, now renamed Food and Drug Administration).  What happens then is I can market a “natural” product as a “food supplement” and not as a medicine and it doesn’t have to go through same research as big pharma products.

The problem on this end is that there is a myriad of lousy products out there.  I am an advocate of Chinese herbal medicine but I am also the first to caution against lousy products that only end up harming the patient and the reputation of Chinese medicine.  in China, you see news about companies being penalized for putting out lousy products.  What about us?

Health Secretary Esperanza Cabral has good intentions.  We should be protected from bogus products.  I however, do not agree with the new translation for food supplement “warnings”.  I shan’t print the Filipino version here, but I can tell you it means “this product is not medicine and cannot cure any disease.”

This is obviously where I have a beef.

As a Chinese medicine doctor, I cannot agree that just because something is not produced by Big Pharma, it cannot be considered, “medicine.”  The American Heritage Dictionary defines medicine as “An agent, such as a drug, used to treat disease or injury.”  Note, it says an agent, SUCH AS a drug.  This means that there are other agents, while NOT drugs, that can be used to treat disease or injury.

To the Chinese, one of the most important agents are not just food “supplements”, but food itself.

Sun Simiao is known as the “Yao Wang” or “King of Medicinals”.  He is famous for a book entitled “Prescriptions Worth a Thousand Gold”.  Yet here is this important quote from him:

“Doctors should first understand the cause of disease, then treat it with diet. (Herbal) Medicine should only be used if diet fails” – Sun Simiao

Wow, the “King of Medicinals”, famous for life saving herbal prescriptions… recommends DIETARY therapy?!!  Good luck hearing that from Big Pharma.

Unfortunately this applies to "herbal medicine" product hawkers also. Image by Mike Adams. http://www.naturalnews.com/021638_conventional_medicine_quackery.html

Anyway my final thoughts are these:

1) We should not put down the idea of “food as medicine” as it is actually more effective for a lot of common, everyday problems.

2) The Chinese have this down to a science and I’ll be darned  - the stuff works.  Click http://www.meridianpress.net/intro.html for more info.

3) At the same time, a lot of food supplement products out there are just bunk.  Better not to rely on products made by people who just want your money.  Do your homework.  Pick a tradition of diet therapy (western, Chinese, whatever) and stick to it.

4) Don’t think that one herb or one fruit or one vegetable will solve all your ills.  Make lifestyle adjustments as well.

Now I’m off to get a nice porridge breakfast.  Be well!

Just a short blurb before I go to the airport. There has been a LOT of news lately about acupuncture research – good news – and I haven’t had time to blog about them, much less sort through them, because I have a lecture to give at the Philippine Neurologic Association Midyear Convention in Naga City today. It is about Acupuncture and Movement Disorders.

I am glad that the PNA is open to the idea of using acupuncture as a complementary treatment, particularly in x-linked dystonia. We are actually working on a study concerning this topic.

Updates soon, I hope!

http://nephropal.blogspot.com/2010/05/halloween-comes-early.html

Am tired from travel. But this is worth looking into:

A new study by French and British researchers examined 72 new drug therapy studies to evaluate if there was a spin on the conclusions for the benefit of the drug.

“More than 40% of the reports had spin in at least 2 of these sections in the main text.”

Reuters link

Abstract:

Reporting and Interpretation of Randomized Controlled Trials With Statistically Nonsignificant Results for Primary Outcomes

Isabelle Boutron, MD, PhD; Susan Dutton, MSc; Philippe Ravaud, MD, PhD; Douglas G. Altman, DSc
JAMA. 2010;303(20):2058-2064.

Context Previous studies indicate that the interpretation of trial results can be distorted by authors of published reports.

Objective To identify the nature and frequency of distorted presentation or “spin” (ie, specific reporting strategies, whatever their motive, to highlight that the experimental treatment is beneficial, despite a statistically nonsignificant difference for the primary outcome, or to distract the reader from statistically nonsignificant results) in published reports of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) with statistically nonsignificant results for primary outcomes.

Data Sources March 2007 search of MEDLINE via PubMed using the Cochrane Highly Sensitive Search Strategy to identify reports of RCTs published in December 2006.
Study Selection Articles were included if they were parallel-group RCTs with a clearly identified primary outcome showing statistically nonsignificant results (ie, P .05).

Data Extraction Two readers appraised each selected article using a pretested, standardized data abstraction form developed in a pilot test.

Results From the 616 published reports of RCTs examined, 72 were eligible and appraised. The title was reported with spin in 13 articles (18.0%; 95% confidence interval [CI], 10.0%-28.9%). Spin was identified in the Results and Conclusions sections of the abstracts of 27 (37.5%; 95% CI, 26.4%-49.7%) and 42 (58.3%; 95% CI, 46.1%-69.8%) reports, respectively, with the conclusions of 17 (23.6%; 95% CI, 14.4%-35.1%) focusing only on treatment effectiveness. Spin was identified in the main-text Results, Discussion, and Conclusions sections of 21 (29.2%; 95% CI, 19.0%-41.1%), 31 (43.1%; 95% CI, 31.4%-55.3%), and 36 (50.0%; 95% CI, 38.0%-62.0%) reports, respectively. More than 40% of the reports had spin in at least 2 of these sections in the main text.

Conclusion In this representative sample of RCTs published in 2006 with statistically nonsignificant primary outcomes, the reporting and interpretation of findings was frequently inconsistent with the results

Statistical proof of what we’ve been saying all along.  We can make studies say what we want.

In recent news clippings, especially in the UK, we’ve seen many an article putting acupuncture down.  Here is a refreshing change of pace:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/08/health/08patient.html

I leave it to the reader to click the link above (opens in a separate window).

Acupuncture is a useful modality worth getting

I know that it focuses on the lack of insurance coverage for acupuncture, but the mere fact that it comments on the costs of getting treatment implies that it is worth getting.

Yes, I am lazy and tired today (ha).